Re-reading Yali Upannemi as a prologue to Gamanaka Meda

Saman Wickramaarachchi

FICTION: Here I re-read Yali Upannemi, a novel which was condemned by its author, several years back and no longer in print now, as a prologue to his new book Gamanaka Meda (in the middle of the voyage). Gamanaka Meda, for its author, is the seventh stage in genealogy of middle class of this country. This review is not of Gamanaka Meda.

It is in fact a critique on concept of nostalgia. But I have been urged, by my own nostalgia, to return to the beginning of the voyage of Gunadasa Amarasekara as a creative writer. After reading Gamanaka Meda, I was prompted to re-read Yali Upannemi.

The child is initially attached to the mother's body by the umbilical cord. Even after birth mother breastfeeds the baby and sustains the attachment. According to Freud the child's attachment to its mother's body is broken by the interference of his father.

If the child grows missing that stage, he fails to enter the symbolic world of his father or his culture, which is known as Oedipus stage. He would become a pervert like Ranathunga, the protagonist in the novel Yali Upannemi.

Yali Upannemi is the story of a man called Ranathunga. In his adult life he marries Nanda, a prostitute. The novel analyses how sexuality is connected to the life of a male person. Condemnation of this book as a bad one by the author himself amounts to repression of his own feelings.

Some traits of the character of Ranathunga reveal how he is attached to his mother. His subsequent sexual life and so called love was never realistic but imaginary. What he expects from any woman is a motherly love. How his affair with Vimala was ended affirms that fact. Vimala constantly accuses him that he loved not her but some other object he sees in her. In fact, Vimala is not wrong.

His imaginary object is none other than his mother. Even in Soma, whom he met in university, he looks for his mother. Why couldn't he continue his love affairs with any woman he met for long? What he interprets as sexuality is not any physical union with women. It is, for him, an imaginary puritanical incorporeal love.

Thus, the object of such love would only be his mother. But what was he doing in his whole life is nothing but running after the substitutes for his mother.

This run ends as he becomes a pervert. His perversion is the tragedy in his failure of sustaining Oedipus complex.

What I am doing here is reading a text in psychoanalytic explanation.

The concept of transference, the patient's relationship to the analyst as it develops in the treatment, is considered as the reader theory of psychoanalysis.

In that context the text reacts on reader as to how a patient is influenced by the analyst and vice versa. But what this analyst has to expect, in clinical treatment, is that the analyst would bar in comprehending his repressed desire.

In fact, for an analyst, a better way to reach the repressed desire of the subject is to analyse that barricade itself, between him and his analyst.

We comprehend Ranathunga's repressed desire, in the text, by way of analysing his behaviour before women which was depicted in his realistic style by the author. But, as Ranathunga's misleading behaviour makes us believe that his courtship is transcendental and in corporeal, we are not successful in touching his repressed desire.

The reasons why this novel was severely criticised and condemned by some readers were obvious. The protagonist, in his childhood, was deeply touched by seeing his mother's bosom. Some readers had been shocked in reading that part of the novel. Even the author, Gunadasa Amarasekara was not able to digest what he had written.

If the relationship between the reader and the text is taken into account as a non-clinical psychoanalytical situation, what happens in this context is that the reader identifies himself with Ranathunga, the protagonist of the novel. Thus, the reader must have been shocked, in an attempt to suppress the memory of his own childhood as well as Ranathunga whose real desire was immersed in his puritanical thoughts in women.

I see no difference between Amarasekara's condemnation of his own novel and the same done by the reader or critics who read it. Both parties fear about something unknown to them.

Amarasekara in his attempt to hide his fear, in nostalgic Jathika Chinthanaya is similar to what Ranathunga's suppressed suffering about his past. Ranathunga in seeking his lost object chases after hundreds of substitutes and his fantasy tour of life testifies to his repressed desires.

Thus I invite readers to make a psychoanalytical survey of Amarasekara's Jathika Chinthanaya.

That would be a 'Da Vinci Code', in reading Gamanaka Meda.

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